When you set out to write a book that you know will take years to complete, it’s reasonable to wonder whether it’ll still be relevant by the time it’s published. It took historian Beryl Satter a full decade to write Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (published last month by Metropolitan Books), but if she had any doubts about the material keeping its edge she needn’t have worried. Her account of the circumstances that fueled Chicago’s ghettos in the mid-20th century is more pertinent now, thanks to the subprime mortgage debacle, than she could have imagined when she started working on it.
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While white home buyers could find affordable, government-insured mortgages, blacks in densely packed neighborhoods on the west and south sides couldn’t. They had to get private financing—contracts, not mortgages—on extremely unfavorable terms. Contract sellers bought ghetto or changing-neighborhood property on the cheap, sold it at huge markups, charged exorbitant interest, and saddled buyers with near-impossible debt. A single missed payment could mean eviction. The cast of characters in Family Properties includes everyone from Mayor Richard J. Daley to the grassroots organizers of the Contract Buyers League, who carried on the battle against contract sellers in federal court after Mark Satter’s death in 1965.
Real estate opportunists used the same excuses then as now—and Chicago, still one of the country’s most segregated cities, now bears the distinction of having the most residents with subprime mortgages, according to a study of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data from 2004-2006. “They say they’re just trying to help low-income people get homes,” Satter told me. “But if you want to help people find housing you give them fair terms and you base it on their ability to pay.”
The issue looked promising to Lowell Thompson, an African-American artist and arts promoter. “I was happy when I saw it,” he says. “But I looked through it and didn’t see any black faces, and I didn’t see any names of anybody that I recognized as being African-American.”
Taylor’s giddy appreciation of her job and staff might have been juiced by the atmosphere at the Trib. Three days after the “Art in Chicago” issue, management laid off 53 editorial employees (for details, and reader comments, see Michael Miner’s News Bites blog at chicagoreader.com). The list included three magazine staffers and longtime art critic Alan Artner. At press time it wasn’t clear whether dumping Artner would mean a total loss of visual arts criticism and reporting at the Trib, where it’s pretty much been him or no one for decades. Maybe they’ll drop the verbiage altogether and slap on the stars. v
